While the result of the influence of Satan is that life is often hard to bear, it is as a result of the influence of Venus that life is often hard to understand. The influence of Venus brought a paradoxical, tricky quality to the heart of the universe.
In other words, delusion entered the world. Lucifer endowed matter with a glamour that would dazzle humankind, and blind people to higher truths.
Why is it that the way forward sometimes looks like the way backwards? Why is it that the thing we most ought not to do looks almost indistinguishable from the thing we ought to do? In my heart of hearts I know what I ought to do, but I have another, alien element entwined inside me that wants to lead me astray. The Luciferic element is infused into my very physiology. Desire and delusion combine in me dangerously. Because of Lucifer’s influence, ‘the good that I would do I not; but the evil which I would not, that I do’. (Romans 7.19.) St Paul, who as we shall see was an initiate of the Mystery tradition, is saying that part of me always knows what is right, but that it is often overruled by a part that is in thrall to Lucifer.
MODERN SCIENCE NEVER FRAMES THE questions, How did delusion come into the world? Or imagination? Or willpower? But to the ancients delusion, imagination and will were among the greatest forces in the universe, living out there in three-dimensional space as well as in our own minds. For them the history of creation was an account of how these things came to be.
Friedrich Nietzsche said, ‘Unless you have chaos inside you, you cannot give birth to a dancing star.’ Humans would never have been able to become freely creative, brave or loving if they had not been able to make mistakes, to see things as other than they are and to believe things to be other than they are. Because of Lucifer it is the case that we do not always believe in proportion to the evidence. We can often believe what we want to believe. For instance, the life of someone we know can appear a miserable failure or a heart-warming success depending on how we choose to look at it, whether good-heartedly or mean-spiritedly. And when the harsh fire, the primeval sulphur burns in the pit of our stomachs, it is difficult for us to choose to be good-hearted.
When in the very beginning the Earth goddess had been attacked by the god of Saturn, the young Sun god had arrived to protect her, and, fighting a great battle in heaven, had defeated Saturn. The candidate for initiation who was being shown the secret history of the world had therefore already watched one great battle. He now had to watch another one in which the enemy was the great snake that had slithered into Paradise in order to corrupt it.
Who was to be the new champion to fight this second battle?
As with the Church’s conflation of Satan and Lucifer in order to disguise its astronomical roots, we must now disentangle another deliberately created confusion.
In the early chapters of Genesis telling the story of creation, the word usually translated as ‘God’ is, as we have seen, ‘Elohim’. Later Genesis ceases to refer to Elohim and instead the word usually translated as ‘God’ is ‘Jehovah’. Biblical scholars working outside the esoteric tradition have tended to explain what appears to them as two different names for the same God as the result of two different literary strands, the Elohim strand and the Jehovah strand, probably dating from different periods and woven together by a later redactor.
However, scholars working within the esoteric tradition have a much simpler explanation. Elohim and Jehovah are not different names for the same entity but different entities. Elohim is, as we have seen, a collective name for the Seven Spirits working together as the god of the Sun, while Jehovah came into being when one of these seven broke away to defend the Earth from Venus.
In order to discover Jehovah’s true, astronomical identity, we must look again at the iconography of his opponent, Venus. We must also remember that for the ancients the history of the origins of the cosmos was as much about how human experience was put together, how experience gained its characteristic structure, as it was about how the physical universe was put together. In other words, it was as much about the principles of human nature as about the laws of the natural world.
Human nature is so formed that any power I may have to resist my animal desires — indeed what stops me from becoming a mere animal — derives from my capacity for thought and reflection. Venus was traditionally depicted holding a mirror, but not out of vanity as is nowadays supposed. The mirror was a symbol of the power of reflection to modify desire.
The god of reflection was the god of the great reflector in the sky — the moon. In all ancient cultures the moon regulated not only fertility but thought.
In fact the initiate priests believed that in order to create the conditions in which human thought would be possible, the cosmos had had to arrange itself in a particular way. In order for human reflection to be possible, the sun and the moon had had to arrange themselves in the sky so that the moon reflected the light of the sun down to earth.
They also believed that this arrangement in the sky had to be reproduced on a smaller scale inside the human head. There the pineal gland represented the sun, and the gland which could modify and reflect on the visions that the pineal gland received from the spirit worlds was the pituitary gland.
This might seem one of the madder things that anyone has ever believed, but to the ancients it corresponded to their everyday, lived experience. They tracked small changes in their consciousness, which seemed to them to mutate with the changing positions of the sun and moon. Readers are invited to check their own experience to see whether their dreams are more vivid when the moon is big and full.
If you observe oysters in a tray for a month, you will see that they wax and wane with the moon. Modern science has confirmed that the pituitary gland behaves like an oyster.
THE GOD OF THE MOON WOULD BECOME known to the Hebrews as Jehovah and to the Muslims as Allah, the great god of thou-shalt-not.
So at the climax of this great cosmic drama of creation, with the earth in danger of becoming a living Hell, a new force arose to meet Lucifer. Just as the seven Elohim had acted to hold Saturn/Satan in check, now one of these seven broke away to become the god of the Moon, and from there directed operations to hold Venus/Lucifer in check.
This great cosmic battle against Venus was remembered in cultures around the world, for example in the story of Krishna’s battle with the snake-demon Kaliya, and the stories of Apollo’s battle with the Python and of Perseus combating the sexually ravenous dragon that threatened Andromeda by using his shield as a mirror.